Archive

As many of you prepare to leave campus for the summer, this is as good a time as ever to consider backing up your files. Geographic diversity – keeping files in multiple physical places – is a very good idea for your most important files as protection against hard drive failures and natural disasters. One way to do this is to copy files to a USB drive and take it home (or, for your home files – keep a copy in a locked drawer at work). Our network drives (H, O, etc) are backed up to tape. But another way is to back up to “the cloud,” as many people refer to internet-based storage services like Google Docs and Windows Skydrive. Here’s how: Read more…

Sometimes learning a few keyboard shortcuts can really save you a lot of time. Both Windows and Mac users can take advantage of these time-savers. On your PC keyboard, look for a key that looks like the Windows logo (⊞) between your Control and Alt keys. On your Mac keyboard, look for the Command key (⌘). Below are some of our favorites Read more…

Would you like to be able to create a desktop icon that would bring you directly to a website or computer program that you use daily? On Mac computers this is called an “Alias” and it is relatively easy to create one yourself! Read more…

Would you like to be able to create a desktop icon that would bring you directly to a website or computer program that you use daily? On Windows machines (PCs) this is called a “Shortcut” and it is relatively easy to create one yourself! Read more…

Do you find yourself sending out the same message over and over with very slight alterations? If you would like to be able to use what you have written previously in a new email, you might want to use “Canned Responses” which is one of the “Google Labs” available for Gmail.

The rest of this entry contains instructions about how to use Canned Responses. Read more…

The rest of this entry contains instructions on how to create a filter (click “Read more…”). Read more…

Google’s services are great, but definitely not perfect. To that end, I came across this set of slides in Google’s support area that gives some tips on troubleshooting Google Mail and Calendar problems.

Sometimes, problems are caused either by a brief outage in service or a Google Lab or similar add-on that has been enabled that is causing a problem. But if a Labs feature is causing the problem and you can’t even display your inbox, what then? Disabling labs can be accomplished by visiting this custom address (note the “labs=0″ part at the end of the address) https://mail.google.com/a/augustana.edu/?labs=0.